Katarzyna Ostapowicz spent a very fruitful month (October 8 - November 4, 2015) visiting the SILVIS Lab, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. During the visit she focused on forest fragmentation assessment in broad spatial and temporal scale (tasks 2-4).

New paper in our project submitted!

August 5, 2015

Elżbieta Ziółkowskasubmitted the paper "Understanding unexpected reintroduction outcomes: why do European bison do not colonize suitable habitat in the Carpathians?" to Biological Conservation!

With her colleagues from the Jagiellonian University (Katarzyna Ostapowicz), Humboldt-University in Berlin (Benjamin Bleyhl, Tobias Kuemmerle), and Polish Academy of Sciences (Kajetan Perzanowski) she used the case of the European bison (Bison bonasus L.), reintroduced in the northern Carpathians in the 1960s, to illustrate how fine-scale habitat suitability analyses combined with functional connectivity modelling can help to understand post-release spread, identify movement corridors and potential barriers, and thus to mitigate the shortcomings of past reintroduction projects.

She showed that although vast suitable habitat exists for European bison along the main Carpathian ridge, functional connectivity of potential bison habitat patches to former release sites is low, mainly due to a number of movement barriers associated with roads crossing the main Carpathian ridge in the north-south direction. This explains the unexpected recent range expansion of European bison towards human settlements and agricultural areas, where conservation conflicts are destined to intensify in the future.The study emphasizes the importance of landscape-scale connectivity analyses to guide restoration efforts, and of adaptive management to ensure the success of reintroduction projects.

Landscape Ecology conference in Portland, USA

13 June 2015

Katarzyna Ostapowicz gave two talks on the application of GIS&T in modeling of habitat suitability and connectivity of the brown bear (Ursus arctos) in the northeastern Carpathians at the 9th IALE World Congress: Crossing Scales, Crossing Borders: Global Approaches to Complex Challenges, which took place in Portland, Oregon USA (5-10 July 2015). The Congress was a joint meeting between the International Association of Landscape Ecology World Congress (WC) and the U.S. chapter of IALE (US-IALE). The main goal of the meeting was to highlight challenges and opportunities for understanding complex natural and social processes and the potential for effective stewardship in a rapidly changing world. Topics of landscape fragmentation and connectivity were addressed in different contexts, including implications for conservation management and planning, ecosystem services, landscape genetics, or future scenarios.

Katarzyna Ostapowicz gave a talk on the application of GIS&T in modeling of landscape fragmentation and connectivity of the brown bear (Ursus arctos) in the northeastern Carpathians at the conference IV Ogólnopolska Konferencja "GIS w nauce", which took place in Poznań (1-3 June 2015). The goal of the conference, organized by the Department of Geoinformation and Laboratory of Bioinformatics of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, was to discuss new GIS tools and methods, and to exchange GIS knowledge among scientists from different disciplines. A special technical session was dedicated to GIS applications in biological sciences.

Elżbieta Ziółkowskasubmitted her paper "Differences in connectivity assessments for large carnivores based on habitat versus movement models" to Landscape Ecology!

With her colleagues from the Jagiellonian University (Katarzyna Ostapowicz), University of Wisconsin-Madison (Volker Radeloff), Humboldt-University in Berlin (Tobias Kuemmerle), and Polish Academy of Sciences (Nuria Selva, Wojciech Śmietana) she investigated how much connectivity assessments differ when relying on a resistance surface from a habitat suitability model versus from a movement model using brown bear (Ursus arctos) in the Northeastern Carpathians as a model species. She showed that brown bears preferentially selected areas with high forest cover, close to forest edges, and with low human pressure (i.e., away from human settlements and roads) in both habitat suitability and movement models. However, in the habitat suitability model, most predictors were more strongly related to habitat suitability at broader scales, versus finer scales in the movement models. Furthermore, high topographic complexity was strongly associated with bear habitat suitability, but avoided during movement. Her results show that resistance surfaces based on habitat suitability likely underestimate connectivity, because they predicted substantially higher resistance values for most of the study area, including for corridors. Connectivity analysis based on habitat suitability models can thus be erroneous and lead to misinformed management decisions when protecting corridors.

Team members at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

December 8, 2014

Katarzyna Ostapowicz and Elżbieta Ziółkowska spent a very fruitful month (November 6 - December 7, 2014) visiting the SILVIS Lab, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. During the visit they focused on testing and developing of different landscape structure representations and their influence on landscape fragmentation and connectivity assessments (tasks 2-4).

Landscape ecology conference in Bobrowa

22 September 2014

Katarzyna Ostapowicz and Elżbieta Ziółkowska gave two talks on the application of GIS&T in modeling of landscape fragmentation and connectivity at the conference Ogólnopolska Konferencja Naukowa "Krajobraz z komputera: Modelowanie krajobrazu - nowe narzędzia, metody, typologie", which took place in Bobrowa near Białystok (17-20 September 2014). The goal of the conference, organized by the Polish Association of Landscape Ecology and the Institute of Geography and Spatial Organization of the Polish Academy of Sciences, was to discuss new tools, methods and landscape classification / typologies developed by the Polish scientists.

We would like to thank everyone that joined us for the workshop "Current trends in landscape fragmentation and connectivity assessmnet" and session "New perspectives in landscape fragmentation and connectivity assessment" organized within the 2014 IGU Regional Conference in Kraków, Poland (August 18-22, 2014). We hope that you found the workshop and session informative and worthwhile!

We are more than happy to invite you to a workshop "Current trends in landscape fragmentation and connectivity assessmnet" and session "New perspectives in landscape fragmentation and connectivity assessment" which will take place during the 2014 IGU Regional Conference in Kraków, Poland (August 18-22, 2014).

Check out news about the workshop program and registration details here

We are more than happy to invite you to a workshop "Current trends in landscape fragmentation and connectivity assessmnet" which will take place during the 2014 IGU Regional Conference in Kraków, Poland (August 18-22, 2014).

Katarzyna Ostapowicz and Elżbieta Ziółkowska spent a very fruitful month (September 16 - October 16, 2013) visiting the SILVIS Lab, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. During the visit they focused on testing and developing of different landscape structure representations and their influence on landscape fragmentation and connectivity assessments (tasks 2-4).

New paper in our project submitted!

October 7, 2013

Elżbieta Ziółkowskasubmitted her paper "How are connectivity assessments affected by the data available to represent the matrix?" to Landscape Ecology!

With her colleagues from the Jagiellonian University (Katarzyna Ostapowicz), the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Volker Radeloff) and the Humboldt University (Tobias Kuemmerle) she investigated the importance of the matrix for connectivity assessments. Her results showed that different matrix representations can greatly affect assessments of corridors (including their lengths, effective distances and spatial locations) but not the relative rankings of habitat patch importance. She also found that the selection and parameterization of connectivity measures have a much stronger effect on the calculation of patch importance than the matrix representation itself. These results are of high importance for conservationists and land use planners, who are often forced to rely on imperfect data on matrix resistance, either because dispersal behavior of a given species is unknown, or the relevant matrix information is unavailable.

IALE 2013 European Congress in Manchester

September 12, 2013

Katarzyna Ostapowicz and Elżbieta Ziółkowska took part in the IALE 2013 European Congress in Manchester (September 9-12, 2013), where they presented results on applying landscape integrated models in the assessment of spatial patterns of land abandonment and forest re-growth and on influence of different landscape representations on connectivity assessments.

This time the Congress was focused on "changing European landscapes", examining how and why landscapes around us are changing, and how landscape ecology can help us to plan for the future at local to global scales.

GIS conference in Lublin

June 26, 2013

Katarzyna Ostapowicz and Elżbieta Ziółkowska gave two talks on the application of GIS&T in modeling of landscape spatial pattern and landscape corridors at the GIS conference in Lublin (June 24-26, 2013).

Project has just started - find out more!

October 24, 2012

Integration of categorical- and gradient-based approaches in landscape fragmentation and connectivity modelling using GIS&T (2011/03/D/ST10/05568) - a project supported by a grant from the National Science Centre - aims to develop new approaches allowing integration categorical- and gradient-based landscape models for more accurate representation of landscape structure (Landscape Integrated Models - LIM) and based on that - a comprehensive description (quantitative and qualitative) of landscape/habitat fragmentation and connectivity. The project will be carried out by a research team from the Institute of Geography and Spatial Management, Jagiellonian University, Poland, in collaboration with international research teams. It started in August, 2012, and will end in December, 2015.